Candidates hit back hard, fast against online attacks

Barack Obama is not a Muslim, and John McCain did not tell the television show "60 Minutes" he was a war criminal who intentionally bombed women and children in Vietnam.
Joe Biden is not planning to step aside in favor of Hillary Clinton as vice president, and Sarah Palin did not order books banned from the library when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.
But if you have spent any time browsing the Internet this year, you may have read rumors to the contrary.
All these stories and more are being e-mailed to friends and family and posted on blogs.
And they are all false.
Heard that Obama was really born in Kenya and thus not eligible to be president? Wrong.
Heard that Palin was a member of the Alaska Independence Party? Nope, she wasn't.
But these stories are potentially damaging to the presidential campaigns of Obama and McCain, Washington communications expert Ron Bonjean warned, so it is critical to rebut them as firmly as possible.
"Fighting rumors on the Internet takes hypervigilance and a lot of caffeine. Left unchecked, these rumors can get out of control, because perception is fact," he said.
Obama and Palin are the subject of the largest number of e-mails, said Rich Buhler, founder of the fact-checking Web site, truthorfiction.com.
"The last two election cycles, there have been rumors about each of the candidates, but there has been nothing like this election," said Buhler, who has been running his nonpartisan site for 10 years.
"The number of Obama e-rumors has been huge, the stuff claiming that he was a Muslim. There are probably 15 or 20 Obama e-rumors. They have circulated massively," he said.
Buhler attributes the popularity of Obama e-mails to the fact that he is a "phenomenon."
"He is new, he is a threat" to some people, Buhler said. "When McCain named Sarah Palin, she became a phenomenon, so there were immediately a number of rumors about her, and now it's the Obama-Palin hit parade."